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The (non)sense of humour: art, subversion and the quest for freedoms -

Roger van Wyk

Visual Century Volume 3: 1973–1992 Edited by Mario Pissarra Wits University Press, 2011

Who shares the joke?

One talks of ‘sharing a joke’ with a person or group. They are drawn into a shared space,

usually reflecting social values. Henri Bergson, writing in 1900, “Laughter: An Essay on the

Meaning of the Comic”, emphasizes that humor is to be understood within a social context, as

“laughter always implies a kind of secret freemasonry, or even complicity, with other laughers,

real or imaginary… how often has the remark been made that many comic effects are incapable

of translation from one language to another, because they refer to the customs and ideas of a

particular social group!” (Project Gutenberg: n.d.).

Western art history is one such language, an exclusive club. Its humor is mostly understood

from within its own discourse. Conceptual art, and with it much of contemporary art practice,

started with a Dadaist joke. When Duchamp submitted Fountain to the exhibition that he had

participated in organizing with the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917 he

expected it to be rejected – which it was, and discretely put out with the garbage (Nesbit

1994). The significant provocation was in the agency of the artist, challenging the boundaries of

his own inner circle of avant-garde intellectuals, staging a practical joke. The seriousness of the

joke was articulated in the subsequent discussions.

South Africa’s particular experience of modernism during the 1970s and 1980s was marked by

its peripheral and subordinate relationship to the Western centers, by its fundamental racial

divisions, and the political conflict that unfolded. In contrast to the way modernism was taught

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during this period – as a progression of discrete styles one improving upon and innovating from

the other, each towards a more enlightened position – current discourse emphasizes the

complexity and contradictory nature of these processes. Not only has the utopian idea of

historical progress unraveled, but also the ideas of a linear progression of influences and of

diffusion from center to periphery are of little use. As MOMA curator Robert Storr comments,

we're “faced by the simultaneous development of many Modernisms, each with its own history

and prehistory. Information moves so fast across borders and at the same time it's always

filtered as it moves, so it doesn't end up meaning the same thing wherever it travels” (Ferguson

1994).

Despite South Africa’s apparent isolation, European avant-garde art movements had profound

affects on artistic practice in South Africa. Many artists borrowed styles or strategies and

applied them to local situations. Inspired by utopian gestures of earlier epochs they shared a

belief in the notion of a better future. Through art practice some sought to fuel the desire for

social revolution - or to contribute toward a growing resistance. Others expressed despair.

Some art and performance work was cynical and dystopian. In the 1980s, as conflict in South

Africa escalated and was suppressed, it seemed at times that ideals of democracy would never

materialize.

Artists were often caught between support of ideologies for political liberation and acute

skepticism for such grand narratives.1. This being the decade of postmodern theory’s

ascendance, some embraced deconstruction as a method for unpacking their cultural baggage.

Against the backdrop of the opposing ideologies that characterized the cold war and with the

violent political confrontation at home, South African artists were forced to challenge western

cultural assumptions implicit in their education and socialization and to grapple with real issues

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of difference in their everyday experiences. This inward--looking critique has become a feature

of much contemporary South African art practice.

Humor and the absurd in art emerging from South Africa during the 1970s and 80s is indicative

of these conflicts and manifests in complex ways. Those who understand the references share

the joke, which in this instance spans both the discourse of contemporary art and the social

context of a racial, political revolution. Ironically, or perhaps predictably, the artist’s intended

protest was often overlooked or misunderstood, not only by the general public, clueless about

art, but also by the provincial art elites. Works produced to no acclaim and given little regard

decades ago are sometimes the subject of renewed interest by younger intellectuals and

acquisitive dealers in the current age of hyper--commodification, helping feed burgeoning

international art markets.

1976 - Coitus interrupted

A student masturbating in front of his lecturers as part of his final exam performance for a Fine

Arts degree at the University of Cape Town (UCT) was interrupted by rioting schoolchildren

chased by police through the campus. The students were protesting state violence in

suppressing the student-led uprising that had started in Soweto on June 16th, 1976.

When this story is told,2 usually amongst fraternity of the art school, the recognition is

immediate, evoking laughter with deep irony. An impetus to shock the status quo within the art

academy by harnessing contemporary avant--garde art strategies was rudely displaced by

fundamental political disruption of complacent white society. The interruption of this

(in)significant ‘wank’ was symptomatic of the broader crisis of relevance that Western art

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practices faced in the context of liberal institutions of knowledge during the deepening political

crisis that enveloped South Africa through the 1970’s and 80’s. The incident is memorable only

because it highlights the isolation of this small fraternity from the broader political discourse.3

Today, looking back, the spectacle of the interrupted student highlights the forces that shaped

the predicament of the fine arts during that period: the white South African male artist (with his

pants down) referencing a Euro-American performance idiom; the learned group of (white)

lecturers, most of whom had studied at universities in the UK or Europe and were relatively

familiar with such performance art; militant black students, inspired by Black Consciousness,

some of whose families had been forcibly removed from inner--city homes to peripheral

townships (angry and confrontational); and the Police (poorly educated, indoctrinated, armed

and dangerous). Each of these groups would no doubt laugh at the spectacle of the artist’s rude

interruption, each from different points of view.

The exclusion of black artists from white dominated art institutions, and hence discourse, is

recorded in Namibian artist John Muafangejo’s incisive linocut, An Interview of Cape Town

University in 1971.4 Many viewers may relate to the experience of the interview but in this

instance the racial power relations recognized in the stylization of the image set the humor.

Your laughter, if you find it funny, is coded in these terms. The faces of eight white art school

academics stare directly at the viewer, strange alien pairs, with identical, wide-open eyes fixing

the viewer’s gaze. The lone figure of the black applicant-artist is expressionless, outsider, other.

Consciousness and complicity

In January 1971, Steve Biko, aged 25, began his address, entitled “White Racism and Black

Consciousness”, to the Student Congress at the University of Cape Town, by quoting Aimé

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Césaire, “No race possesses the monopoly of beauty, intelligence, force, and there is room for

all of us at the rendezvous of victory” (Biko 2004: 66). It was a vision at odds with the South

Africa he inhabited. Biko’s biting critique of white liberal intellectuals had far-reaching

consequences - challenging them to address white racism instead of attempting to articulate the

interests and aspirations of black South Africans. He argued that “these self-appointed trustees

of black interests (had) set the pattern and pace for the realization of the black man’s

aspirations” with their “natural passport to the exclusive pool of white privileges” and

“characteristic arrogance of assuming a ‘monopoly on intelligence and moral judgment’” (Biko:

2004, 71).

Black Consciousness emerged as the dominant intellectual (op)position in the 1970s. Biko and

others called for a rekindling of black pride and positive identity. Whites were challenged to

critique their own socialization. Gavin Jantjes’ A South African Colouring Book series, executed in

Hamburg in 1974/5, soon after his departure from South Africa in 1970, reflects such Black

Consciousness critique. In “Colour these Blacks White”, 1974, he applies a hand written quote

from Fanon’s “Racism and Culture” (1956), “Having judged, condemned, abandoned his cultural

forms…the oppressed FLINGS HIMSELF upon the imposed culture with the desperation of a

drowning man”. By reversing into negative Ernest Cole’s black and white photos of black South

Africans at a wedding the racial identities switch. The white wedding veil of the bride could

read as a mourning veil, eclipsing the ritual to suggest that of a funeral. The viewer is instructed

to “COLOUR THESE BLACKS WHITE” with an accompanying diagram of a paint tin where all

the options are white. By inviting participation in a game of classification Jantjes forces

reflection on cultural values and complicity in their imposition. (This series is discussed in the

earlier essay by Emile Maurice. It is also discussed and illustrated in Christine Eyene’s essay in

the previous volume.)

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Mark Saunders, in his book Complicities - the Intellectual and Apartheid (2002: 168), exposes how

intellectuals, in their opposition to political and social structures, are also complicit participants

in those systems. For all Biko’s critique of the white liberal position Saunders suggests that Biko

proposed Black Consciousness as the “true” inheritor of the liberal tradition. “The liberals

must realize that they themselves are oppressed if they are true liberals and therefore they

must fight for their own freedom and not that of the nebulous ‘they’ with whom they can

hardly claim identification” (emphasis added by author).5

While Biko proclaimed “the most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of

the oppressed” it was acknowledged by Marxist intellectuals such as Rick Turner (before he

too was assassinated by agents of the state, not long after Biko’s murder in 1977) that it was

incumbent on whites to acknowledge their complicity in the social structure - their socialization

as part of the dominant group - as a starting point for opposing it (Saunders: 173).

This contested project for emancipation played itself out amidst state censorship,

assassinations, and a campaign of covert terror against any opposition.

Schizophrenia

Wopko Jensma’s poetry was first published in the Pretoria-based magazine Wurm (1966--70)

followed by Orphir, edited by Walter Saunders and Peter Horn (1967--76), with his graphics

also printed in Izwi (1971--74). Literary magazines of this sort played a critical role in voicing

cultural opposition during this period of increasing censorship and after the vacuum created by

the silencing and imprisonment of opposition leadership in the mid 1960s. Jensma’s poetry was

hailed as a first truly South African synthesis of language that cut across racial and cultural

categories.6 He gave expression to the conditions of oppression experienced by black South

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Africans so effectively that many readers thought he was black (Gardiner 2005). This led to an

interesting discussion concerning ‘speaking for others,’ in which he was defended by the editor

of Orphir, Peter Horn: “Wopko's identification with the oppressed is not a 'feat': he is forced

into it by the circumstances of his life and by the make-up of his society. He does not speak the

language of the discarded, rejected and oppressed because of a pretended change of skin

pigmentation, but because he has experienced being discarded, rejected and oppressed ...”

(Gardiner 2000)7

Johannesburg art teacher and gallerist Wolf Weinek, and his partner Gundi, who were enduring

friends and supporters of Jensma, describe his infectious humor, magnetic personality and deep

sense of irony (personal communication, July 2009). In 1972, Jensma’s woodcuts were exhibited

in an exhibition entitled “Wail for the Beast”. His graphics show his particularly strong influence

by Dada artist Hans Arp - with a characteristic animist sensibility. Many of these graphics were

included in his collection of poems Sing for Our Execution”, published in 1973. Michael

Gardiner, who was close to Jensma and remained one of his few supports when his life

degenerated to an ‘outie’ 8 living off a disability pension at the Salvation Army shelter, felt that

it was critic Peter Wilhelm's insights that best described Jensma’s unique quality: "This is the

clue to Jensma. He stays together, in shape, alchemically combining enormously diverse cultures

and experiences. He is a terrifying, new sort of human. He is the first South African." Yet, as

Gardiner (2000) points out, he fell apart.

In his deconstructive use of language Jensma blends a unique South African vocabulary, including

its most creolized, informal, urban slang variants. His concrete poems were the first produced

in Afrikaans. Exposure to Belgian and other European avant garde-inspired poets contributing

to Wurm may have been his initial prompt to explore this tradition. His poems are humorous

nonsense, addressing harsh South African conditions, direct and cynical.

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Jensma’s close affinity to African culture and participation in traditional rituals helped nurture an

embodied syncretism that is apparent in his poetry and animist-art. His medical condition of

schizophrenia was tragically appropriate for an artist who managed to blur the binary opposites

defining his life. (fig 1)1

Jensma’s work provided inspiration for Willem Boshoff in the evolution of his Kyk Afrikaans

series (1980).9 The series began with a typewriter that he literally manipulated to bits to

produce freeform word patterns - concrete poetry - with great variance and depth, resulting in

a book by that title. The poems are witticisms and meditations in Afrikaans that deconstruct

meaning and intention in both text and artwork. Ivan Valdislavić (2005: 26) describes how

Boshoff typed a biblical passage from Revelations onto a single piece of paper, laying each

successive page on top of the last. The title Verskanste openbare (entrenched revelation) implies

a contradictory, subversive joke. “The reader trying to retrieve meaning from this layered

chaos is compelled to relive the moment of its disappearance…An inversion of the Creation’s

moment of illumination: not light but darkness”.

Boshoff’s humor and conceptual approach made use of the absurd as a private language. His

early work was not exhibited until he was better established as an artist. The personal diary

that he wrote while in the army was handwritten in a secret code as a defense against being

understood by the authorities that it critiqued. Bangboek (fig 2) is a play on the Afrikaans

derogatory term for a coward, ‘bangbroek’ (scared-pants). This ‘scared book’ was a way for the

artist to maintain his sanity and express his rational opposition as a white, male, compulsory

military conscript. He had already resisted carrying a weapon on a military camp and

encountered harassment for opinions he had expressed. Secret and covert gestures in response

to feelings of alienation and persecution are the themes of Kafka and the territory of the

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absurd. Within the increasingly totalitarian environment of South Africa, triumph of the rational

was increasingly impossible. No objection to the ridged Calvinist doctrines underpinning the

racially divided State was to be tolerated - particularly not in the armed forces. Bangboek was a

form of rational (though absurd) resistance in the face of fascism - dissent going underground

and posing as a decorative pattern, to tease the viewer and remain impenetrable. (see Emile

Maurice’s essay, where Bangboek is discussed further).

Boshoff, like Wopko Jensma and Walter Battiss, shares an affinity with Dada. They embrace the

irrational, nonsense and humour as mechanisms to publicly expose and break the molds that

circumscribed South African identities and vocabularies.

Free to desire

For Walter Battiss, his lifelong fascination with San rock art provided a link to African

spirituality. This was a romantic connection that deeply informed his work but never

referenced the historic genocide of the San or the politically compromised circumstances of

contemporary San cultures. Battiss is the mercurial trickster, managing to survive the turmoil of

his age with his image intact as a ‘gentle anarchist,’ while never overtly confronting the political

status quo. His was a subtle subversive path. His work is better understood in terms of the

broader aims of Surrealism.

Surrealism was not a discreet moment that ended with the outbreak of WW II but an ongoing

movement of radical thinkers that continued contributing to anti-colonial movements

throughout the 1950s, and was linked to the political and intellectual agitation that culminated

in the Paris protests of 1968. (Mahon 2005: 21) This utopian spirit allied to the principles of

Surrealism gripped Battiss through much of his later eclectic production. It is interesting to

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note the historic links between Surrealism and the Negritude writers who inspired Black

Consciousness. All are concerned with utopian notions of freedom and strategies for social and

political change. 10

While Battiss avoided direct political statements through our darkest political era, he is known

for creative genius, generosity of spirit and wicked playfulness. The utopian movements of the

1960’s affected him deeply, when ‘freeing the mind’ was echoed by sages of the day, ranging

from the Beat poets and LSD prophet Timothy Leary, to human rights activist Malcolm X.

Returning from a visit to Hamburg and London in 1969, in the wake of the near revolution,

Battiss produced a body of work that captured the sexual tension and personal/political edge of

the era.

Battiss expressed deep suspicion of politics. 11 He described himself as a hedonist (in pursuit of

pleasure) and prescribed to a zen-like ‘cosmic consciousness’ refusing to accept dialectic

rationalism.12 His work demonstrates an enduring preoccupation with surrealism.

Breton summed up the five tenets of surrealism during his 1940s exile in the US: “the

exploration of the unconscious; the unification of the supposedly disparate (dream and action, the

irrational and rational); faith in chance which unveils the veiled in society; humor, which refuses to allow

man to wallow in tragedy; and knowledge of oneself and ones desires.” (Mahon 2005: 77). These

principles aptly describe Battiss, who perhaps went further than most of his generation with

respect to exploration of self - particularly later in life, when the benefit of success offered

extensive travel, personal friendships with leading European contemporary artists, 13 and an

openness to sexual experimentation. His engagement with chance, performance (or

‘happenings’), interest in the trance images of the San, embrace of fantasy and dreams, focus on

desire and the erotic, and his infectious, overt humor all echo surrealist principles.

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The erotic work Battiss produced through the political crisis of 1976, such as his “Orgy” prints,

14 may be seen as escapist indulgence in the context of the contemporary brutal repression

happening in Soweto or they can be understood as part of a more fundamental strategy for

interrogation of reality and social change.

Breton’s libertarian conception of surrealism embraced and radicalized Freud’s psychoanalytic

theory, particularly focusing on Eros, the ‘life drive’, in pursuit of the pleasure principle. Alyce

Mahon argues that this ‘politics of Eros’ was the principal subversive force behind surrealism in

the post-war period, and it fed into the social movements of 1968. (Mahon, 2005,21)

Eros as a strategy was at play in the work of Battiss. In the service of social change. 15 One of

Apartheid’s cornerstones and first laws was the Immorality Act (1950-1985). Sexual relations

across the color line threatened the entire monstrous edifice of apartheid. Calvinist repression

of sexuality was entrenched in law and linked to ideological notions of superiority, civilization,

and progress. In this context we may better consider Battiss’ protest sculpture, “Dumb

Dolly”—a stuffed doll that he took to public occasions, attracting substantial media coverage.

Dumb Dolly represents a desexualized Calvinist ideal of ‘Miss South Africa’, without legs, sexual

organs, breasts or a mouth.16 When Swiss artist Jean Tinguely visited South African to attend a

Grand Prix event in the early 1970s Battiss arranged for his friend to construct one of his kinetic

sculptures at the university where he was teaching. One imagines his delight at the opportunity to

present one of Tinguely’s thrusting, phallic, kinetic sculptures as the ‘model’ for the drawing

class for his conservative young students.17

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In response to the conceptual and performance work he encountered internationally Battiss

created Fook Island as a conceptual fantasy tuned to a local environment that was accessible and

playful but also profound in challenging ideas of nationalism. His imaginary island–created

through the production of heraldry, titles, postage stamps, and rituals — offered an escape

from the South African condition and identity. He even got the government printers to print his

Fook passports. He could simply reclassify himself and his kindred spirits as Fookians, shed the

white South African label, laugh at the absurdity of their own imaginary freedom - brought into

being by a strategy of creative branding - and free the mind for better things. It was a virtual

reality that anyone could participate in. In an attempt to guard his privacy and have time for

art he created a secret society of invisible people.18

Battiss delighted in the subversion but was also strategic in using the media to carry his message

to a wider audience. The humor inherent in the creation of Fook embraced nonsense, defended

the right to creative imagination above logic, and appropriated the freedom to invent identity

and deny nationality. In this it shared some of the characteristics of such Fluxus events as the

Festival of Misfits (London, 1962) that his friend Daniel Spoerri was active in developing.

Beneath the frivolity of the actions and contrived situations was a critique of the paradoxes

inherent in society and a commitment to fundamental social change. These strategies also

confirmed what Freud recognized in humor - the release of repressed psychic energies and its

potential to reveal that which is hidden. (see also Hazel Friedman’s essay in the previous

volume, where the dialectic between Fook Island as artistic and political expression is discussed).

Culture and resistance

The year Battiss died, 1982 was something of a watershed moment in the politics of South

African art. A photograph exists of him talking to Marlene Dumas at the Kassel Documenta,

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where she was selected to exhibit, having taken up a scholarship in Amsterdam in 1976. Pages

from her scrapbook were published in a Dutch cultural magazine that year which included the

hand written note:

THE CONFLICT

W. European ART Motto: Culture and dialectics. (Kassel 1982)

S. African Manifestation: Culture and RESISTANCE. (Botswana 1982)

This is dedicated to those who ‘grew up’ in the 70’s. Those who left and those who stayed. All those

with split hearts.

(Bedford 2008: 30,31)

Dumas’ split heart mirrored the deepening schizophrenia that gripped South Africa and its

growing population of exiles.

The Culture and Resistance conference and festival in Botswana in 1982 anticipated the coming

period of intensified political mobilization. South Africa moved into a period of unprecedented

political turmoil—with increasing militarization of the state, cross-border hostilities and internal

instability leading to successive states of emergency.

Creative freedoms were increasingly challenged as political circumstances became more

broadly confrontational. Even within the field of political cartooning a discussion ensued as to

the responsibility of the artist in representing ideological positions. Jonathan Shapiro (Zapiro)

produced cartoons that often took a moral standpoint in critiquing political events of the day

and supporting the revolutionary movements.19 In contrast, Derek Bauer’s cynical cartoons

took no clear political position on issues of the day. He defended the right of the artist to free

expression. “Fuck the constituencies, fuck the political parties, fuck the political persuasions,

fuck the mood of the day. You only have responsibility to your artwork, to your subject, to

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yourself. If it’s anything else it stops being art, it becomes propaganda or advertising” (Pissarra

1991: 79).

If I couldn’t laugh I would cry

The increasing absurdity of the apartheid state, the irrational mechanisms of its bureaucracy

and its brutality, created a desperate psychological environment. Theatre was effective in

tapping into the latent emotional intensity that the situation created. Woza Albert!, written by

Percy Mtwa, Mbongeni Ngema and Barney Simon became an international hit after it opened at

the Market Theatre in Johannesburg in 1981. The play incorporated Black Consciousness

poetry and promoted notions of black self-worth. The plot posits the second coming of Christ

amidst the confusion of apartheid as a sounding board for moral reckoning with hilarious

consequences. Comedian Pieter Dirk Uys’ production of Adapt or Dye, 1981, performed in the

same theatre, was one of the most effective political satires of its age. Besides effective

caricatures of politicians Uys was able to crack up the audience by simply reading proclamations

from the Government Gazette, such as numbers of people who were reclassified by race group

each year.20 It was the creation of his alter ego, drag persona Evita Bezuidenhout, an

ambassador for a fictitious apartheid homeland, which captured audiences across the political

spectrum. (Nelson Mandela even had a pin-up of Evita in his prison cell.) When this character

stepped out of the theater and into the real political environment of transformation, appearing

on public platforms, Evita became more art-performances than theatre. Embraced by opposing

politicians, Evita demonstrated South African’s ability to laugh at themselves - and to transform.

Such humor demonstrates Bergson’s notion of laughter as a corrective, an “intension to

humiliate, and consequently to correct our neighbor” (Project Gutenberg). Woza Albert! played

to mixed audiences using humor to recalibrate constructions of black identity. Uys played to

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mostly white audiences, lampooned their comfortable positions as much as their embattled

leaders, and traded on their complicit feelings of guilt.

Complicit consumption

As the international economic underpinnings of the system were highlighted by the call for

sanctions against the apartheid state, the target of humor elected by several shifted to the

complicity and complacency of the bourgeoisie. This was a challenge given the low interest they

had in art. Benz Kotzen’s street poster campaign strategically deployed his art in the public

arena. Kotzen branded ‘apartheid’ by creating fictional adverts, which he printed and pasted up

in the streets of Johannesburg (1981). Apartheid Filters, Apartheid *White Elephant* Matches,

Apartheid Twak (tobacco), Apartheid Laager (beer) - each presented a product of unique local

cultural significance.21 His parody of the apartheid ideology and propaganda forced on the

population turned it into a commercial brand for consumption. But this was also a reminder

that we all consumed the addictive and pleasurable products of the system.

Billy Mandindi’s drawing, Man Amongst Men (1989), (fig 3) captured the racial fear of the other

and the political intransigence of the period. Using a duplicated figure from Dumle Feni’s Fear

(1966) of a boy with his hand held in horror in front of his face, Mandindi contrasts the binary

opposites of a black youth’s rejection of Afrikaner heritage, symbolized by Van Riebeek’s

portrait, with a white youth’s rejection of the liberation movements, symbolized by the portrait

of Mandela. Poised between them stands a muted, black female puppet-like character, in

liberation colors, her mouth covered by an X, rendered mute. The comic lion from a Simba

chip advert and a knife handle obscure her, suggesting latent violence and the overwriting

power of complacent consumerism.

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Marlene Dumas’ self-portrait, Het Kwaad is Banal/Evil is Banal (1984) borrows its title from

Hannah Arendt’s report on the trial of Nazi Adolph Eichmann.22 A wry reminder that evil is

perpetuated by the complacency of those who fail to act against it. Looking back over her

shoulder to confront the viewer, does she place herself as participant in the crimes of her

generation?

As opposed to overt political statements by black artists like Thami Mnyele who chose exile

and activism in Botswana in 1979, the subject of much of the critical work by white artists in

this period continued an inward-looking critique. Mnyele’s assassination by South African

military hit squads in 1985 along with a random group of exile families brought the conflict into

perspective for many who had attended the MEDU conference three years earlier.

In considering art production in this period one is aware of white artists’ contradictory

positions in criticizing the status quo and the power structures while enjoying its benefits, often

from within the privileged environment of liberal universities or colleges. In these white

intellectual circles the critical focus was increasingly on the artist and their audience. Michael

Godby (1990: 20) points out, in a discussion of the print series Hogarth in Johannesburg by

artists William Kentridge, (fig 4) Robert Hodgins, and Deborah Bell (1990), “The power that

this (privileged) class claims … in the art world and in society at large is, it is suggested, hollow.

Whereas protest art in the liberal tradition paradoxically served to confirm the sense of power

in the viewer at the expense of the depicted victim, the new art actually confronts the viewer

with the image of self as victim.”

Kentridge’s Trioka triptych (1985)23 recalls George Grosz’s depictions of the decadent

bourgeoisie at play whilst chaos reigns around them. All is not well in this paradise: the

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copulation of the ruling classes, their perpetuation, is increasingly consumed by violence, amidst

the barricades of revolution. The excesses of wealth and privilege also found expression in

Penny Siopis’ heavy impasto paintings of tables overloaded with food and cakes, oozing obscene

sexuality, atop pretty lace doilies usually associated with conservative religious households. (fig

5) The effect is oppressive, suffocating.

Ship of fools

Hodgins referenced the Ubu character from Alfred Jarry’s proto-Dadaist play, “Ubu Roi,” as a

vehicle for humorously plotting the inherent evil at play in political power positions. Ubu

eclipses Shakespeare’s Macbeth as the poorly written, lowbrow 20th-century version of the evil,

greedy, bigot/despot. To evoke Ubu is a sort of punk gesture, thumbing one’s nose at high

culture and its pretense. For Hodgins Ubu appears in many guises and different races: the

African Despot, the General, the Businessman, the Interrogator. (fig 6)

These were popular themes in the 1980s. David Brown’s tortured and militarized figures

evoked both horror and humor.24 Stanley Pinker’s oil painting Players in the Game (1985) (fig 7)

depict a comic grouping of such institutional power figures whose identities have become

muddled. The military commander with a pig nose rides a springbok-headed ‘hobby-horse’. He

has exchanged his hat and emblems with a white-robed, metal-faced priest, while a diminutive,

wigged judge is portrayed as a puppet-clown. Bruce Arnott’s public commission for the

Johannesburg Art Gallery in 1985, Citizen, (fig 8) was a bronze sculpture of a portly

businessman with distinctly animal-like hooves and caricatured Punch and Judy pomposity. The

object of Arnott’s derision was the cities self-satisfied captains of industry, who indirectly

financed his commission.

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Brett Murray’s sculptures confronted issues more directly. In response to a 1983 whites-only

referendum, called to gauge support for the government’s amended apartheid system of

parliamentary representation, he cast a pig’s head in fiberglass, painted it red, and inserted into

the top of the head a sign offering JA/NEE options, in lieu of a butchers’ price tag. The work

blandly tagged the doomed idiocy of the white electorate. Murray also produced a series of

stumpy infantile characters targeting militarism and figures in power. The (self) portrait of the

artist is most telling. In one hand he holds a paint pallet, the other an enema-pump – a cure for

constipated indulgence.25 (fig 9)

Dissonances

There was a growing generation of artists isolated from international dialogue and markets with

little support from commercial galleries and peripheral to the bubble of recognition that clung

to the academic institutions. While these old liberal enclaves strove to gain some credibility by

transforming their exclusive white attendance and recognition, the youth began doing it for

themselves. Responding to the radicalizing of popular culture, particularly in music and

performance, as articulated by Black Consciousness, reggae, and punk, they began creating new

venues and opportunities where they could at least get pier group recognition if not financial

reward or institutional position. Exhibitions were staged in studios, houses or peoples

apartments.

John Nankin and Ivor Powell started the non-hierarchical performance collective Possession Arts

in Johannesburg that prioritized spontaneity, chance and open participation. Powell explained,

“We start with a deadline, with a venue, and then sort of let it out that we are going to do a

series of performances or whatever and anyone who is interested could come and do one.

Opening nights are generally dress rehearsals and things are at least half worked out by that

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stage.” (Vellet 1984: 91) 26 The format allowed for anarchic experiments, strange

juxtapositions and frivolous nonsense. Performances were inconsistent, uncensored and not

necessarily politically correct, but concepts derived from the current social and political

conflict. (for more on Possession Arts see previous essay by Hayden Proud).

As the inner city of Johannesburg transformed through economic pressure and breakdown of

apartheid controls new venues opened up for experimentation to supplement or challenge the

progressive hub established at the Market Theatre/Gallery, which had become something of a

new status quo for the left. The more radical events began to shift to venues like the Black Sun

Theatre and music performances venue, Jameson’s bar. In the mid 1980s Robert Weinek and

Wayne Barker established a new venue in the inner city, Gallant House, staging music, art

exhibitions and absurdist theatre by Chris Pretorius, Megan Kruskal and others. Pretorius had

staged many ‘alternative’ productions at Cape Town’s Glass Theater in the early 1980s. Inspired

by the European avant-garde, including Raymond Roussel (who greatly influenced Duchamp and

the Surrealists). Pretorius, like his colleagues engaged with Possession, was adept at evoking the

violent tension underlying apartheid bourgeois life while often dispensing with narrative

sequence and direct references. Artist Wayne Barker worked for Pretorius for a short while

and was influenced profoundly by him. In 1986 Barker and Weinek established the Famous

International Gallery (FIG) in another grungy downtown area of Johannesburg. They helped

bring an anarchic, playful (seldom sober) theatricality back into the art world. The opening

show at FIG, called Urban Melodrama, was reminiscent of antics performed by Battiss in the

1970s. Barker recalls … “We covered each painting in newspaper and we got the Prince of

Swaziland to open the show. He used to walk around town in heels with a cigar mic[rophone]

shouting into a megaphone, wearing an afro and a kilt.” (Atkinson 2000: 22)

20

This confluence of the irrational and humor echoed the spirit of Dada. Hugo Ball aptly

describes this sentiment in his 1916 texts, The Fight out of Time: “ The Dadaist loves the

extraordinary, the absurd even. He knows that life asserts itself in contradictions…He no

longer believes in the comprehension of things from one point of departure, but is nevertheless

convinced of the union of all things, of totality, to such an extent that he suffers from

dissonances to the point of self-dissolution.” (Higgie 2007: 31) Sadly, the description is apt for

many creative people engaged in renegade acts of cultural resistance in this period, with severe

consequences for interpersonal relations and their mental health, regularly fueled by manic and

compulsive inebriation.

Change

1989. As the decade drew to a close the edifice of the Marxist totalitarian states crumbled, with

the fall of the Berlin Wall, and populist demonstrations in Tiananmen Square. Preparations for

Namibian Independence and Mandela’s release from jail signaled the beginning of Southern

Africa’s chapter of much anticipated, but elusive, independence. Many had expected ‘the

struggle’ to continue for at least another decade.

Lyotard’s skepticism for metanarratives of universal human emancipation – ideals of progress

toward greater freedom and social justice - were underscored by the failure of the Stalinist

regimes. The experience of post-liberation Southern Africa has likewise indicated the fallibility

of ideologies of liberation – with corrupt governance and the entrenchment of material

inequities.

South African artists continued to endeavor to dissect and transcend their prescribed identities,

often split between positions of activism and anarchism. Humor in art through these chaotic

21

decades took many forms. At its most profound, this art attempted critique of art’s institutions

and interrogated the claims of modernity in a society under siege. The basis for engagement

was interrogation of self, acknowledgement of complicity and contingency in the construction

of identity and history. Its most effective mechanism: Lyotard’s (then contemporary)

postmodern notion of invoking the unpresentable in presentation itself.27

Mandindi’s Death of Township Art, (1989) is a significant bookend to this period.28 He

cannibalizes our European heritage of Enlightenment (itself a metanarrative of progress in the

promise of peace) to signal his rejection of the patronizing label ascribed to black artists and

their subjects. The putti that hold up the burning tire around the giraffe’s neck (in place of a

crown) are borrowed from conventions of Western art - Titian’s Venus - they don the dunce

hats from Goya’s Flight of Reason but look through menacing clown eyes that are the crosses of

Generation X. Mandindi asserts his presence as artist amidst a privileged pier group. Despite a

limited exposure to academic education — acquisitively grabbing, deconstructing and

juxtaposing images from the media, popular culture and art history - he produced one of the

most iconic, provocative, multivalent (and humorous) images of the age.

It was Wayne Barker who effectively exposed the ‘bend over black-ward’ duplicity of white

liberal art institutions with his dual submissions for the Standard Bank Drawing Competition

(June 1990). The selection committee eagerly accepted the naively drawn political work titled

CV Can’t Vote which he submitted under the pseudonym Andrew Moletse, while rejecting the

drawing submitted under his own name from his series of Pierneef landscapes. This is the

artists joke at its most effective. Like Duchamp’s urinal, the action mocks primarily itself, its

fictitious creators, and challenges art’s institutions, particularly their role as gatekeepers of

acceptable practice.

22

While the Moletse scandal played out in the South African media Neil Goedhals was

manipulating his Bachelor of Arts in Fine Arts degree certificate from the University of

Witwatersrand. Using drafting tools and white crayon, he partly erases the text and overlays

with it with the road sign for a dead end. (fig 10) At the bottom the text is added cul, cul-de-sac,

and cull, next to which the artist over-signs the adjusted readymade with his signature and date,

Jul 16 1990. Following Goedhals’ tragic death a month later, Ivor Powell recalled a comment

Goedhals had once made to him “There might not be anything at all that actually makes sense,

but you still want to see a list of the things that don’t make sense” (Powell 1990).

1 “Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity toward metanarratives.”

(Lyotard 1979: xxiv-xxv).

2 The art school legend has conflated two different pieces by Gary Schneider: a masturbation

video (exhibited earlier) and a naked performance (in process at the time of the ‘invasion’ of

the campus. See Hayden Proud’s essay for more).

3 One might contrast this action with the simulated masturbation performed by feminist artist

Sanja Iveković in 1979 on the balcony of her apartment in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, while a parade

with a motorcade carrying president Tito passed in the street below. Her action aroused the

attention of surveillance crew on the roof, who alerted the police to have her removed from

the balcony. Recorded in photographs and text, the artist focuses attention on the totalitarian

regime’s mission to control both public and private space. Her strategy is humorous, erotic,

and exposes power relations.

4 Reproduced in Proud (2006: 214).

23

5 See also Biko (2004: 27, 66).

6 Lionel Abrahams, in the Rand Daily Mail, observed: "At a time when people are more than

ever aware of their colour, even in the arts, Wopko Jensma is the only South African artist in

any medium who has transcended the barriers. His work is neither English nor Afrikaans, Black

nor White" (Gardiner 2000).

7 Having married in defiance of the race laws, he had two biracial children, lived in Swaziland

and Botswana and later returned alone to South Africa, suffering increasingly from

schizophrenia.

8 Colloquial term used for ‘outsider’ or homeless person.

9 Reproduced in Vladislavic (2005: 22—33).

10 Surrealist spokesman André Breton, fleeing fascist occupation of France in 1940 on a ship

bound for the U S, met Aimé and Suzanne Césaire during a brief stop in Martinique. It proved a

monumental encounter, and is regarded as a profound turning point for Breton. “In the tropics

he found boisterous enthusiasm, creative joy, revolutionary promise, a deliriously wild nature—

a whole rhythm of life unlike anything he had ever known before; a revelation, one might say,

and a confirmation of the surrealist effort ‘to bring human conduct into equilibrium again, and to

restore to humankind a higher understanding of life’” (Rosemon 2008). Suzanne Césaire pioneered

the discourse of Negritude with her husband, articulated a proto-feminist position, and

together with Aimé applauded the mission of surrealism: “When Breton created surrealism, the

most urgent task was to free the mind from the shackles of absurd logic and of so-called

24

reason. But in 1943, when freedom herself is threatened throughout the world, surrealism,

which has never for one instant ceased to remain in the service of the largest and most

thoroughgoing human emancipation, can now be summed up completely in one single, magic

word: freedom. . . .” (Rosemon 2008)

11 “Black power and white power to me as an artist are completely untenable. I can’t conceive

of it. The way ideologies split up people is beyond me.” (Davidow 1979)

12 “It gives me a certain satisfaction to accept negative and positive realities. For example non-

space and non-time. It is the fringe of a concept beyond reality. I suppose that Plato was getting

near it too. That this reality is not the reality You are getting near to the indefinable. That

whatever statement you make that you think is pretty rational, that there is an opposite

statement that is valid too.” (Davidow, 1979)

13 Such as Daniel Spoerri, known for New Realism, Fluxus, Eat Art.

14 For examples see Carman and Isaac (2005: 55, 153).

15 As Battiss put it: “Don’t you feel that when you are making love you are moving onto a

situation of cosmic-consciousness? You are not human anymore. That is satori. And that is why

I draw erotic pictures. I liberate many people this way. I could still be put in jail for it” (Davidow

1979)

16 Dumb Dolly is illustrated in Walter Battiss Gentle Anarchist

25

17 Tinguely once remarked to a friend that people often asked about the meaning of his work. He

explained that it was “just about fucking” (Schulthess 1988),

18 This was initially called the ‘ISSIP’ for “the International Secret Society of Invisible People’ but

on consideration of the negative connotations of ‘International’ (recognizing nations, “and

nations go back to tribal warfare”) he changed it to the ‘Cosmic Secret Society of Invisible

People’ (COSSIP)” (Davidow 1979).

19 He has bravely continued this practice in the new democracy, now attacking with equal

viciousness the corruption and greed of the former revolutionaries who took leadership in the

new regime. At the time of Pissarra’s interview with Bauer (1988) Shapiro was envious of

Bauer’s editorial cartoon slot with the Weekly Mail, and critical of his anarchic approach. “I do

have a big problem… with the fence-sitting and anarchism that he and some other people

engage in. I don’t feel we can afford that kind of luxury. Some people would give their eye-teeth

to have that sort of slot he has, to put a message across.” (Pissarra: 1991: 67)

20 "In terms of the Population Registration Act and in answer to a question from the Member of

Parliament from Houghton, Mrs. Helen Suzman, five hundred and eighteen Coloreds were

reclassified as Whites, fourteen Whites became Colored, seven Chinese became White, two

Whites became Chinese, three Malays became Whites, one White became an Indian, fifty

Indians became Colored, fifty-seven Coloreds became Indian, seventeen Indians became Malay,

four Coloreds became Chinese . . . " (Trillin 2004)

21 These examples are reproduced in Williamson (1989: 90).

26

22 This work is reproduced in Dumas and Bedford (2007: 52. In her reporting of the Eichmann

trial, originally written for The New Yorker, Arendt (1963) questioned the extent to which evil

was an uncritical response by ordinary people to authority, conventions and mass opinion.

23 Reproduced in Crump et al (1987: 8)

24 See, for example, Williamson (1989: 56—7).

25 Works from this period are reproduced in Williamson (1989: 29).

26 Participants included: artists such as Joachim Schonfeldt, Frank van Schaik, Neil Goedhals,

Susan Bristow, Jeff Lok; writers, actors and film makers such as Johan van Wyk, Rina Sherman,

Matthew Krouse, Brian Tilley, and Debra Watson.

27 “The postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the unpresentable in

presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms, refuses the consensus

of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the impossible, and inquires into new

presentations -- not to take pleasure in them, but to better produce the feeling that there is

something unpresentable.” (Lyotard 1992: 15).

27

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30

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